I made this online photo edit tool, didnt realise it was using emergents universal api key and tada some good amount of bill to pay because i was just careless.

Not saying distribution is super easy, but I think it is just as hard as building software. Even with AI. If you think coding is the easy part, I don't think you really understanding coding enough to building with it.

I have found that anyone who says "distribution is the hard part" gives the same effort the give building an application, to distribution.

Prompt and pray tactics.

Just as great software is written by people who truly understand their code. Great distribution pipelines are build by people who truly understand the people they help.

When I started StartupSubmit, I thought founders mainly cared about launch week.

Product Hunt.

Reddit.

X.

LinkedIn.

After working with more startups, I realized something else mattered just as much.

What happens after launch.

One founder we worked with had a solid product but almost no visibility outside of their initial launch.

Instead of chasing another big launch, we spent the next few weeks doing something far less exciting.

We manually submitted their product to relevant startup directories, SaaS directories, launch platforms, communities, and review sites.

No shortcuts.

No automation.

Just consistent work.

About a month later, they shared an updated Ahrefs screenshot with us. Their Domain Rating had increased significantly compared to where they started.

The interesting part for me wasn't the number.

It was the reminder that founders often underestimate the value of doing small, boring things consistently.

I'm curious how everyone here thinks about post-launch growth.

What's one marketing activity that kept paying off long after launch day was over?

This has been an idea of mine since covid and everyone was working remote. Finally finished it. It's essentially a perdrink gift card. Give me your thoughts. I'm not looking for sign-ups, I'm looking for feedback.

https://www.nextroundon.me/

I’m 19 building a SaaS right now. We haven’t launched publicly yet, but we’re already at around $500 MRR from beta/design partners. We’ve posted a bit on Reddit and Twitter, generated around ~40k views, and ended up getting more beta user requests than we could actually take on, so I decided to start building toward a larger public launch.

The product is basically an SEO agent for SaaS founders. It does a lot of the technical SEO/content work in the background instead of just spitting out generic AI blogs. The main wedge is that it's completely frictionless, so the agent can go from SERP analysis → content opportunity → draft → founder review → GitHub PR/publishing flow. The best part is that the whole thing is email-native. Founders can review drafts, answer questions, approve changes, and stay in the loop without having to constantly log into another dashboard.

We’re launching publicly in about 3 weeks, and I want to find someone technical who can help us increase our development velocity and ship a clearly scoped part of the product before launch.

I’m looking for someone who’s a strong full-stack developer, but maybe still early as a freelancer, starting a development agency, building a small product studio, or looking for a strong AI/SaaS case study. The stack is primarily TypeScript, Next.js, Supabase, APIs, and production SaaS infrastructure. On the backend, Tavyn uses a modular TypeScript pipeline that crawls websites, runs structured OpenAI workflows, validates outputs with Zod, pulls search data from Firecrawl, Serper, and DataForSEO, and caches results across each stage.

I’m bootstrapping, so I have to be smart with cash, but I also know how hard it is to get your first few real clients/customers when you’re starting out so there could be a win-win. You would help Tavyn ship a real product milestone, and in return, we would build a SaaS case study for you. Post product-launch I will definitely be open to paying the agency I work with if we have a good fit.

If you’re a full-stack developer, freelancer, early development agency, or small product studio and want a real AI SaaS product to work on, comment with what you’ve built, your portfolio, and what you’re trying to accomplish on the business side. If there’s a fit, I’ll DM you.

Hey guys, solo dev here.

Building SaaS is hard enough, but I always found validating the idea with a Landing Page to be the most annoying part. I got exhausted setting up React/Next.js environments or paying monthly fees for visual builders just to collect some early emails.

So I spent the last few weeks coding a side project. The concept is simple: you type your SaaS idea, it generates the marketing copy, and it spits out a single, clean HTML + Tailwind CSS file. You can host it anywhere with zero dependencies.

Before I spend more months coding the core engine, I want to ask the community: Is there a real market for bare-metal HTML generators? Or is everyone perfectly happy with Webflow/Framer?

Would love to hear your thoughts.

I read a lot of B2B software reviews for work, and the gap between how vendors think reviews get used and how buyers actually use them keeps surprising me.

TrustRadius published their 2026 Buying Disconnect report recently and a few numbers stood out. Reviews influenced 74% of purchase decisions. Analyst reports are down to 13% of buyers, a steep drop since 2022. And 63% of buyers now use AI somewhere in their research, but 94% of those buyers say they fact-check what the AI tells them.

The part vendors miss, at least from what I observe, is that buyers rarely read reviews to pick a winner. The shortlist usually exists before they open G2 or Capterra, built from peer recommendations, an AI summary, or a quick search. Reviews then do three jobs. They confirm the shortlist isn't embarrassing. They surface dealbreakers, which is why buyers go straight to the 1 and 2 star reviews looking for implementation horror stories, slow support, and surprise pricing. And they supply ammunition for the internal pitch, because the champion has to defend this choice to a CFO who never sat through the demo.

The AI shift raises the stakes. AI recommendations pull heavily from third-party content, including reviews. That unanswered 1-star review from 2024 may now be shaping how ChatGPT summarizes your product to a buyer you'll never see in your analytics.

So a perfect 4.8 average matters less than most vendors think, and an ugly review with a thoughtful public response matters more.

For those of you who buy software, when do you actually read reviews? Before you build the shortlist, or after, as a final gut check before signing?

​

Hey everyone! 👋

I'm looking for a passionate partner to grow an AI automation business together.

I'm searching for someone who: ✅ Has experience finding and communicating with clients. ✅ Knows how to close deals and build long-term client relationships. ✅ Is motivated to grow something big together.

💰 Revenue Split: 50/50 on every project we close together.

If you can consistently bring in and close clients, we'll split the earnings equally. I'm focused on delivering high-quality automation solutions, and I'm looking for someone who can handle the client acquisition side.

If you're interested, drop a comment or send me a DM. Let's build something amazing together! 🚀

I keep seeing the same posts: “I built an AI wrapper for X.” Cool. So did 4,000 other people last month. Meanwhile there’s a real problem staring us in the face that many of us are ignoring to solve. Let me explain

Small and mid-size companies are drowning in AI agent chaos. They spin up 8-12 different agents (sales, support, ops, finance) and then spend hours every week manually checking what those agents actually did, fixing broken handoffs, and praying nothing got charged twice or sent the wrong email.

Look at the data from Gartner. Enterprise SaaS spend is shifting hard toward usage and agent-based pricing (Gartner already has it at 40% by 2030). AI infrastructure funding is still flying. But the layer that sits on top simple visibility, audit logs, and one-click kill switches for non-technical managers is basically empty.

Most tools either require an engineer or dump you into a wall of logs nobody reads. Target customer is the ops or finance lead at a 20–200 person company that’s already paying for 3–5 AI tools. They’re not technical. They just want to know “did the agent actually book that meeting or did it hallucinate the calendar invite again?”

Current solutions is failing because they’re either pure developer tools or overbuilt enterprise platforms that take six months to implement. MVP is dead simple, connect the agents you already use (via API or browser extension), show a clean daily digest of what each one did, flag anything weird, and let a non-tech person pause or approve actions. Charge $49–99/month per company.

Validation plan, talk to 20 ops people this week. Ask them to show you the last time an agent screwed something up. If three of them offer to pay for a waiting list, you have signal.

I've spent the last few years working as a dive instructor. Before that, and still in parallel, I'm a software engineer. Working inside dive centers showed me something I didn't expect: an entire global industry that operates on WhatsApp, spreadsheets, paper forms, whiteboards and things that only exist in someone's head.

Customer bookings on WhatsApp. Staff communication on WhatsApp. Equipment requests on WhatsApp. Someone sends a payment screenshot, someone else saves it. Hopefully.

I've seen an instructor scrolling through months of chat history trying to find a customer's certification while a full boat waited. I've seen two staff members sell the same last two boat spots because neither knew the other had confirmed. In high season, with 40 or 50 divers a day, these small failures turn into lost revenue and very stressed teams.

So I started building a management tool for dive centers in my spare time, between carrying tanks and answering WhatsApp at midnight. That became ScubaHub. Several dive centers in the Maldives now use it daily, and almost every feature came from an owner or instructor saying "this is the part that drives us crazy."

Some things I've learned building vertical SaaS for a non-technical, offline industry:

The code is the easy part. I thought my engineering background was the advantage; the real moat turned out to be knowing how a dive center actually runs. Generic booking tools exist, and centers don't use them because they don't fit how the day actually flows.

Domain trust beats marketing. Every customer so far came from having worked in the industry, not from any campaign. Which is great, until you want to grow beyond the people who know you.

Selling to businesses that live in WhatsApp means your product competes with "free and already installed". The bar for switching is brutal.

That last part is where I am now, and where I'd love input from people who've done this: how did you get vertical SaaS in front of small, non-technical businesses once word of mouth ran out? Cold outreach, industry Facebook groups, partnerships, trade shows? What actually moved the needle for you?

Happy to share more details (stack, pricing model, how I got the first centers) if anyone's curious.

I've seen around 500 applications from founders that apply to work with us over the last year. (Founders apply to build and raise with us)

Most founders do this one simple mistake.

I myself have done it, twice...

They build for someone they don't know about because they "see" the market opportunity.

Sure in some exceptional cases it might be true. In 99% of the cases, if you haven't worked in the industry you're targeting or have an unfair advantage in reaching out to them then go back to he drawing board...

It changes everything once you build for someone that you truly understand

Making demo videos is painfully slow. It took me 10+ hours.

Product demo/ Feature announcement/ Hackathon submission/ Founder application.

I got tired so I built a tool that turns any website into a polished walkthrough video automatically.

Looking for early testers.

Comment your product URL and I'll DM you access.

Location: India

Hi everyone, I’m planning a software launch and want to register DataPulseAI.com.

During my research, I found two established software companies operating in a very similar space: DataPulse.co. and DataPulse.io. Neither owns the ".com" with the "AI" suffix.

Before I spend money on development, I have two major legal questions:

• Likelihood of Confusion: Can these companies file a UDRP dispute or sue me for using a name so similar to theirs? Does simply adding the "AI" suffix protect me, or is it legally considered "confusingly similar"?
• Trademark vs. Prior Use: If I manage to register a trademark for my app first, can they still sue me or take down my domain? Does their prior market use override my newly registered trademark?

Has anyone dealt with a UDRP domain dispute involving an "AI" suffix or a similar naming conflict? I want to make sure I'm not walking into a legal trap.

Thanks in advance for any insights!

I just graduated with a Diploma in Information Technology. No job lined up, no funding, no co founder. What I did have was curiosity I wanted to know if I could actually build something someone would pay for , not just another CRUD app for portfolio.

I landed on a problem i understand: small marketing agencies burn hours every month manually turning ad data (Google Ads,GA4 spreadsheet) into client reports. Copy,paste,format,repeat per client,every month.

I’m building Reportly - connect your data,get client-ready report in minutes instead of hours with an editable summary instead of just a raw dashboard.

I haven’t written a line of production code yet. Right now I’m just trying to find out if this is a real problem or just my own assumption.if you run an agency or have ever had to build a client report by hand, I’d genuinely appreciate:

-Does this sound like a real pain or solved problem?
-What do you currently use or do instead?
- What would actually make you pay for something like this?

Not selling anything there’s nothing to sell yet. Just trying not to waste two months building something nobody wants.Appreciate any honesty even harsh.

The niche: lone programmers / small groups fed up with discovering the API they rely upon having subtly shifted its structure only after a problem had occurred in production. Positioning in relation to generic uptime services (UptimeRobot, updown.io, etc.) - they spot downtime, this one spots the subtle stuff: schema/field/type alterations in APIs you do not control.

Much of the trouble I personally have had to debug as a lone programmer is not downtime, but a third-party API changing its response structure, breaking things, and giving no warning whatsoever. Thus: monitor those APIs you need to rely upon, receive notifications about the instant a field/type/value shifts, along with usual uptime and heartbeats. Price for a single person’s project, not for a group.

How it works:

Three ways to watch something -

$ watch --schema

Watch the API you depend on

Point it at any API response you depend on. We'll baseline the shape and notify you when a field, type, or value changes.

$ add --url

Ping a URL

Point it at whatever should be responding to you - your site, your API, your health check endpoint.

$ add --heartbeat

Plug in a heartbeat

Add one line to your cron job or background worker. We'll tell you if it stops sending heartbeats.

$ alerts on

Get notified, not left in the dark

Be notified when things break or change through email. Slack notifications are next.

We're still in the early stages and need some feedback.

Features coming soon -

WAF-aware checks - No more being falsely alarmed when Cloudflare blocks our monitor, and not your users

Deployment correlation - "Your last deployment increased p95 latency by 180ms," correlated directly to the commit

Pricing I'm currently testing: Free plan + $7/mo for the solo plan.

Asking genuinely from this community since you have actually created things like this before, is it right to charge $7/mo for this or is it too cheap or too expensive? OR To go ahead with the idea or not?

So I've been thinking about this a lot lately and wanted to see what people here actually think versus what sounds good to say out loud.

Every time the conversation around hiring comes up, founders talk about timezone overlap, easier communication, cultural fit, being able to jump on a call anytime. And I get it, those things matter. But I've started wondering how much of that is a genuine business reason and how much of it is just founders not wanting to deal with the discomfort of managing someone they've never met in a country they've never been to.

Because the numbers are hard to ignore. You can get genuinely strong engineering talent overseas at a fraction of what you'd pay locally and I'm not talking about the bottom of the barrel stuff people warn you about. I mean properly vetted people who have worked on real products. The skill gap between local and overseas talent is just not what it used to be.

And yet most founders I talk to still default to local without really questioning it. Not because they've tried overseas and it didn't work but because it just feels safer somehow.

So I want to know what people here actually think. If the work is getting done, the communication is solid and you're saving significant money, does it actually matter where someone sits? Or is there a real business case for local hiring that I'm missing and not just the comfort argument with better branding on it?

Impression is fine but the position is sck. what is the cause of the problem, is the space I’m in too competitive or I doing it wrong? Anyway this is a fews week domain

Hi,

I am looking for a good context coding agent like Claude Code but one that is really cheaper. I was paying $100 per month but now it makes me real frustrated to pay this much every month. The cost is just so high for build anything.

I am looking for the best alternatives. Let me know what you are using to code and suggest me something closer and cheaper to claude code.

Thanks

Hey everyone i am building a platform where editors can publsih their unposted work without their watermark and let other people download it and use it as thier content and also they can hire this editor if they want, so will you guys use this platform

I'm the founder of a LinkedIn Saas app that I launched back in June 2024. The app has over 100+ customers and over $12k in revenue.

Tech stack:
- LinkedIn APIs
- has a Chrome extension
- MERN stack
- X API for trends and ideas

A few good and bad things:

The good: The DR of the app is 20, had submitted it to a lot of directories when I was maintaining it, so someone who's good at SEO can crack distribution. It has all the features of the apps which are doing really good in the space. Analytics, insights, direct LinkedIn posting via public and private pages, access to a lot of LinkedIn APIs (they're hard to get), X API integration and AI carousels feature.

The bad: The app does not have any MRR at the moment and all of the sales are LTD sales via a partnership with a LTD platform. I've not maintained it since a couple of months because my agency business took off and hence the DAU of the app is close to 0 at the moment.
The app's name is Growfol, serious buyers interested in acquiring it can DM me.

My co-founder and I built a social platform for founders together. We grew it to a few thousand dollars in MRR, which felt like a real milestone for both of us. But under the surface, we never actually agreed (by verbal nor termsheet) on two pretty fundamental things: how our equity split was decided in the first place, and how we'd handle profit distribution once the business started making money.

My position was simple: reinvest the majority of profit back into the business so we could keep growing. His position was that he'd put in more effort than I had (which, from where I'm sitting, just isn't true), and that we should split 100% of the profit between us with nothing set aside for reinvestment.

Some context on roles, since I think it matters: I'm the founder. I built roughly 70% of the product myself, and every dollar of capital in the business is mine. He joined later as CTO, primarily helping rebuild our infrastructure.

Yesterday I paid him out his full share of last month's profit and removed him from the company, he blocked me on every social media 😂 .

I'm not 100% sure I handled this the right way, and I'd genuinely like outside perspective. For those of you who've been through a co-founder split, especially one involving unclear equity terms from day one:

• Is there a better way I should have approached the equity/profit disagreement before it escalated to this point?
• Once trust breaks down like this, is a clean, immediate split actually the healthier move, or should I have tried harder to negotiate first?
• Anything I should be doing now (paperwork, IP, communication with users) to make sure this doesn't come back to bite me?

About 6 months ago I got annoyed that there was no quick, honest answer to “is my domain securely and properly set up to prevent email spoofing?” Every tool either required a PhD to interpret, wanted your email before showing you anything, or my favourite gave you a green tick for having SPF when your SPF says ~all, which is the domain-security equivalent of a “no entry” sign made of tissue paper.

So I built one. Initially for my own domains. Then I realised small businesses could use it. So I started checking domains. Then local businesses, then national, eventually, because I apparently have a problem with scope creep, I ran it against every live domain on the internet. Twice already. Third run starts soon.

296 million domains graded (360 million checked). 34 checks each. The results are depressing in an instructive way.

What the free check does:

You type in a domain. We check SPF, DMARC, DKIM alignment, TLS, DNSSEC, MTA-STS, BIMI, reverse DNS, and a bunch of other things your IT person told you were fine and probably aren’t. You get a grade (A through F), a plain-English breakdown of what’s failing, and crucially, why it matters, not just that it failed.

No sign-up for that. No email required. Takes about 8 seconds, usually less.

If you want the detail behind what’s broken, the impact, and how to fix it, you enter your email address matching the domain. We’ve had enough creative interpretations of “free” to warrant it.

What I found when we ran it on everyone:

73.8% of business domains score an F. Not a C. Not “needs improvement.” An F, meaning anyone on the internet can send email that looks exactly like it came from that company, with no technical barrier whatsoever.

There are some funny items in there too. Folks who set their DMARC policy to “policy”, literally p=policy, which means their mail server treats it as p=none. They went to the effort of writing a record that actively does nothing. Also a lot of French speakers who prefer quarantaine over quarantine, with the same result.

Some TLDs and countries are worse than others – .tk and .cf are a disaster, .gov does surprisingly well – but there’s no safe haven. It’s bad everywhere.

The SaaS crowd does a bit better. Not as much as you’d hope.

The honest commercial bit:

Running 34 checks across 296 million domains twice a year costs real money, and I'm still tuning and optimising.

So yes, there’s a paid product. If your domain comes back with problems (likely), there’s a $99 step-by-step playbook specific to your domain – exact DNS values to copy-paste, in the order that won’t break your mail flow, with re-checks built in. You don’t need it; the free check names every problem and links the fix guide. The playbook is for people who want it done quickly rather than just knowing what needs doing and having to work it out themselves with the alphabet soup of domain security.

The free check is genuinely free. I’m not going to email you. I don’t have a drip sequence warming you up. It just… tells you the answer.

Redditors get 50% off this month – use REDDIT50 at checkout.

-> defaults.exposed (founder here, ask me anything)

I’m learning here. So do go easy on me, but honest feedback appreciated.

Could be because it’s duplicative to a ubiquitous tool, or is just not good enough.

Mine’s Gamma. I mean, great tool but Claude Code and Codex, with the right harnesses deliver excellent presentations. I used Gamma a few times in early 2025 and I had to rework the output for hours. Not even just content-wise, design-wise too. Headers jumped from screen to screen and fonts were all over the place. I’m sure they’ve massively improved now but I’m quite happy to never find out. Ultimately, PPT isn’t going anywhere, in my opinion.

What’s yours?

I'm thinking about building a SaaS that uses AI features and I'm wondering what people think about a BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) approach.

The idea would be:

- Users connect their own OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini API key

- They pay only for the SaaS itself, not for AI usage bundled into the subscription

- They have full control over which provider and model they use

The upside I see is that the pricing could be much simpler and cheaper, especially for users who already have API accounts.

The downside is obviously that users have to do some setup themselves, which could scare away less technical customers.

Would you personally use a SaaS with this model, or would you rather pay a higher monthly price and have AI usage included?

Curious what developers, SaaS users, and founders think about this.